I wrote this in South Africa during the summer of 2000, in honor of my parents, who are devoted conservationists. Violence, destitution, environmental collapse - Africa can give you a feeling of apocalypse.

"To My Dear Parents"

by Sarah Ruden

In a new houseI live alone.My mother and fatherBoth are gone.

They are cancelled byElectric wordsAnd classed as somethingI once heard

From a woods now buried,From a sky now full.Where are my parentsAnd their hard will?

How huge and fieryThese years have grown,To make them nothing!All I have known

Since then is God's--This conflagration,The horror ofHis dispensation.

Command or comfortI have not heard,But see—burned in my tongue,These must be His electric words.

Sarah Ruden was born in rural Ohio and raised in the United Methodist Church. She is a “convinced Friend” or Quaker convert of twenty years’ standing. She holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow, and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University.

"To My Dear Parents" was originally published in The New Criterion, vol. 18, #10 (June 2000), p. 36.